


but the film is a saddening bore

by scioscribe



Category: Community
Genre: Dark, Gen, Mental Breakdown, Postmodernism, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-01
Updated: 2012-10-01
Packaged: 2017-11-15 10:29:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/526302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No change, no story.  The narrative, subverted, collapses like it’s been kneecapped—what you get isn’t a happy ending but just a happy continuance while someone’s life tries to make itself into a story again, so it can stop.  All stories are about things stopping.</p>
<p>In a zombie apocalypse story, the things that stop are always you, so Abed has to stop the story.  He has to cut them out of it like they’re paper dolls.</p>
            </blockquote>





	but the film is a saddening bore

**Author's Note:**

> Celebrating October 1 with zombies! Also, the title comes from David Bowie's "Life on Mars?".
> 
> And this is really not a happy story.

**1**

When it happens, Abed is prepared: no one is better equipped to survive the zombie apocalypse than he is, except for survivalists and everyone who enrolled in the zombie apocalypse class last semester.

And Greendale keeps a wide range of weaponry for its entirely illegal target shooting class.

**2**

He learned how to subvert the narrative during the Dean’s commercial.

The story of an attempt at greatness that collapses on itself like a Jenga tower is a story that’s been told before; what Abed did was make it not a story at all. He undid the natural ending and left the ribbon spooled out. A story that ends with the satisfactory production of a mediocre community college commercial isn’t a story. It isn’t even an anecdote. Nothing happens, nothing changes. No change, no story. The narrative, subverted, collapses like it’s been kneecapped—what you get isn’t a happy ending but just a happy continuance while someone’s life tries to make itself into a story again, so it can stop. All stories are about things stopping.

In a zombie apocalypse story, the things that stop are always you, so Abed has to stop the story. He has to cut them out of it like they’re paper dolls.

It’s easy, because he knows what the story is. The story is always the same story.

**3**

There is the story that Abed tells himself and the story that he doesn’t. He picked a story with a cast of characters and he committed to it.

That’s the story he tells himself about why it took him so long to call his father.

He was at Greendale when it happened and his father has rarely intersected with Greendale.

They all said, “We have to find Shirley,” because that was the context, that was the story—escape the siege, rescue the princess—and it wasn’t until Troy put his chin on Abed’s shoulder when they were going to sleep and said, “I really, really hope my family’s okay, you know?” that Abed even _thought_.

**4**

So they’re holed up in Greendale on the second day—Abed, Troy, Annie, Jeff, Britta, Pierce, and the Dean, Shirley the only one not there because she was home when it happened, taking care of Jordan’s flu when the world fell down—and Jeff is burning his fingertips one by one with Britta’s lighter to make sure the virus hasn’t gotten to him yet. Abed is the only one of them with cell phone signal. He keeps trying his dad, but all he gets are atonal beeping sounds, not even a ring, and then the battery dies. He keeps trying anyway, for some reason. Like he can reach out and make contact.

Then it’s later, the seventh day, and they’re out, looking cautiously around a landscape that is already gray-skied and ashy—not good, the weather taking its cue like that, wanting the story, wanting the world to end—and Abed doesn’t suggest going by his dad’s house. He knows what the story is; the story is always the same story.

His throat hurts. He gets the lighter and he burns himself and burns himself until Troy takes it away and holds Abed’s hands. 

“You’re alive, okay?” Troy says. There are streaks on his face from dried tears. “You’re alive.”

**5**

The first time Abed kills a zombie is the third day at Greendale. The zombie stands up in front of the window. Abed doesn’t recognize him, but his skin is gray to the neck. Drool runs from his mouth. His eyes are still alive enough to hate himself, to know that he’s dead and shambling.

Abed doesn’t think. He’s the story, he brings the ending, he takes the look out of its eyes.

Afterwards, he throws up while Troy rubs his back and Annie gets him slivers of ice from the cafeteria machine. Abed sucks on them. They taste cold and empty.

By the time they leave Greendale, he doesn’t throw up anymore when he has to kill something. He doesn’t even flinch.

**6**

It’s funny how hard it is to leave the story behind.

They go to save Shirley. They don’t go to Annie’s parents’ house, not then, or Troy’s, and they never go to Abed’s.

They go to save Shirley, even though they know that Shirley’s house has picture windows and wooden doors that fingernails could scratch through, given enough time. They go to save Shirley, even though to get to her they have to walk, shotgun stocks in their hands, through a maze of flipped-over cars and smoke, bloody streaks on the road. They go to save Shirley even though when they get there, the windows are shattered and the house is silent. They go to save Shirley, they do, really, they go inside, because the story is inexorable, and the story wants an ending.

The narrative never _wants_ to be subverted. You have to make it bend.

They go inside the house even though they know, already, how the story ends.

**7**

Annie makes noises about finding out where the virus came from and what they can do to stop it.

Jeff asks her how a fucking health care administration major is going to do something like that.

Troy hits him in the face hard enough that it makes a sound like a tenderizing hammer going in to meat, but there’s a moment where Jeff’s lip doesn’t bleed, and Troy just stares at him, his breath going in and out like a whistle.

The virus tends to work its way in from the extremities unless there is a direct point of contact. At least, that’s what they think they know. Jeff tears his shirtsleeve off above the wrist and looks at tan, living skin from fingertip to elbow, and then blood runs down his chin. Troy makes some sort of barking sound that’s really, Abed knows, him starting to cry. Jeff wipes the blood away and looks at it carefully, like there’s something that he doesn’t understand, and then he starts crying, too.

That night, they all strip down to their underwear and look each other over for bites or scrapes. They prick their fingertips with needles to make sure they can still feel, and then they wrap their fingers up with tape so the virus won’t get in that way. They don’t really know how it works, he keeps having to remember that.

Every time someone says, “Okay,” when the needle goes in, Abed lets out a breath he never realized, each time, that he was holding.

**8**

The Dean wears one of Britta’s necklaces looped twice around his wrist. There’s always a little blood on it. If Abed were going to film something, he would film that, because there is a story right there, some beginning and end, and no one needed to die for it to be told.

**9**

Abed wakes up and he’s wearing Jeff’s jacket, the one with the hole in the elbow, and he has Britta’s hair in his mouth. He’s between her and Annie, but neither of them stir when he wriggles out: Britta can sleep through anything and Annie doesn’t cling as tightly as the rest of them do. That’s one of the things he was surprised by, the way Annie doesn’t need them just so she can be strong. That’s a story, too, but it’s one that’s already ended.

It’s Troy’s watch, so Abed goes and sits beside him. Troy hands him a can of tomato soup and Abed heats it as best he can with the lighter, running it in circles along the bottom of the can, just enough to take the chill out. It tastes like paste. He passes it back to Troy.

“Not to tell you how to live your life or anything,” Troy says, “but you know you haven’t talked in a few days, right?”

Abed shrugs. Words are narrative. Silent movies aren’t in vogue any more, they had a shorter heyday, fewer tropes, and no zombies—if they would all be quiet, they could slip out from under the end of the world. He wishes, especially, that Jeff would stop vacillating wildly between inspirational speeches and depressive funks and sarcasm, since it makes him sound exactly like the character that is always dead by the end of the movie.

Troy says, “Are you okay?”

Abed licks his lips. “I’m subverting the narrative,” he says. He can’t talk much above a whisper.

Troy looks at him for a long time.

The black man always dies first in zombie stories. Abed doesn’t know whether Shirley was the price he had to pay to keep Troy or not. He really doesn’t want to talk.

He leans against Troy and looks at the stars.

**10**

Pierce says, “I don’t want to do this anymore,” one day, and then he just sits down.

Abed remembers the Christmas when Pierce was a stop-motion animated teddy bear walking with him through a train, both of them motherless, and he says, “No, come on.” Then for some reason he can’t stop saying it. He just keeps saying, “No, come on, no, come on.” His jaw starts to hurt.

“Don’t upstage me, Abed,” Pierce says. “You act like you’ve never done a death scene before.”

“Why?” There are tears in streaks down Annie’s face.

“It’s all right, Annie.” Pierce is nice, ultimately. The world had to end before Abed could know that Pierce mostly doesn’t really mean to be the way he is sometimes.

“Pierce, this is stupid. Stop trying to dramatically sacrifice yourself.”

“Sacrifice myself?” Pierce snorts. “Jeff, in my best days I could have fought zombies in a circle around you.”

“Great. Stay alive and share your knowledge with us.”

But Pierce stretches out his legs. The wind blows his hair up around his ears.

**11**

It’s been a while. People keep asking Abed how many days since the zombie apocalypse started, but Abed isn’t actually Rainman. He needs a calendar just like everyone else.

His dad is dead. (Probably his mom, too.) Shirley and her family. Pierce.

They don’t run into many people. The ones they meet are mostly dead or infected and dying. Abed is starting to think that they’ve won whatever prize there is to win, the staying alive prize, early registration for whatever comes next; he doesn’t know how they got that lucky. They were good at paintball and blazer tag and now they’re good at shooting zombies that used to wear living skin, but lots of people in the world (when there was a world) were good at paintball. He doesn’t know why they’re the ones that are still alive. It suggests that there’s going to be a story whether he likes it or not. He hopes it’s something postmodern.

They’re walking across a field. His legs hurt. He thinks they’ve been walking for a while.

The Dean’s lost his bracelet somehow.

**12**

Annie has a bandage wrapped around her arm.

“How did you get that?”

“Abed,” she says, “it’s a little worrying to everybody that you’re blanking out all the time.”

“I don’t blank out,” he says. “It’s not like I stop walking. I don’t faint. There are just holes, later.” Little parts of his memories are dead.

She tells him about the bandage and it slips into him and then out again. Later he helps her change it: it’s a long, ugly cut that he thinks is just deep enough to be dangerous. The story is always the same story. Infection is not unusual under these conditions and the virus is still out there. Abed wraps gauze carefully around her again and hopes that it’s clean. Annie’s face never moves. She’s braver than he’s ever been about anything.

If Abed were writing a zombie story right now, but somehow in the past before he were living in one, he would make Annie be a hero.

**13**

They find canned peaches.

“I saw _The Road_ ,” Abed says. “I don’t think we should.”

“It was good in _The Road_ ,” Jeff says. “No one died when they found the bunker. I’d say shut up and eat the damned peaches, but you do too much shutting up these days anyway, so—keep talking and eat the damned peaches.”

Abed eats the peaches. They taste like canned peaches always do—heavily syrupy, sweet. It isn’t like he’s gone a long time without sugar. They pack candy bars for energy—“What do you know,” Britta says, “Snickers really do satisfy”—and everyone’s getting cavities because they remember to loot stores for candy bars but not for toothpaste. But the peaches are cool and slippery and sweet in the _fruity_ way that the candy bars aren’t, and Abed says, “Oh.”

“You’re crying,” Britta says, flat wonderment.

Troy holds out his can of peaches. Abed knows he’s supposed to say no.

He eats them anyway.

Then he has everyone else’s, and he’s running his finger along the bottom of the can the Dean gave him, licking the last drop of syrup off his fingertip, when Troy says, “Don’t go away again.”

“I won’t,” Abed says, but of course he does.

**14**

It’s night somewhere, the sky bright with lightning, and Troy is holding out a cup of water with instant hot chocolate mix poured into it. “It’s not special drink,” he says, but Abed drinks it anyway. It’s warm and Troy mixed the powder in with his finger so it’s still clumpy.

It’s enough to make Abed say, “There might be another timeline where there’s not a zombie apocalypse. I was thinking.”

“Yeah,” Troy says. He leans back and crosses his hands behind his head. The lightning flickers across the sky and Troy appears and disappears like a mirage.

“But if I didn’t meet you then,” Abed continues, “I wouldn’t want it. I was just thinking that.”

He remembers when Evil Abed came over and tried to tell him that there was no hope, not in a world where he didn’t see Troy every day; he remembers how easy it was to believe that. He finishes the not-special drink and lies down next to Troy. Troy is a snuggler: he curls against Abed.

“I wouldn’t either,” he says.

Abed doesn’t know what that makes them, considering how many people are dead. They say it quietly, just to be safe, so it’s only them and the sky that hears until Jeff comes and lies down next to Troy, and Annie holds Abed’s hand. Her skin is very hot.

**15**

The story is always the same story.

The gauze on Annie’s arm wasn’t very clean.

**16**

Jeff’s fingers are always bleeding, now.

Britta says, “For God’s sake, Jeff, you’re not infected, but you’re going to get that way if you don’t _stop fucking stabbing yourself_.”

But Jeff is a little bit past listening. He isn’t all the way gone, not yet—he still takes his watches, he still talks, and he still walks in front of everyone else—but he tells Troy, when Abed can overhear, that he thinks he’s infected, turning into stone, and it’s the prick of the needle that takes it away, but just a little, and just for a second. So he keeps digging, rooting through his own skin, until the blood flows in a constant wet trickle down his palm.

Abed doesn’t like it: Jeff’s a story, there’s an arc, or the collapse of one. He still remembers Jeff stepping in front of him when the Christmas bully-turned-fly-dancer called him a jackass: he’s the savior turned sacrifice, sanity slipping, the leader who blames himself. Abed wants to tell him that he’s never been stone, not really, but this is one of those days where his mouth doesn’t work right.

He sleeps next to Jeff that night.

The way Jeff sleeps has always made Abed sad. Jeff will start off so careful: he will lie right against the edges of the person he’s next to, always touching just a little at multiple points so that he’ll know if they move. Then as soon as he falls asleep, he attaches himself, his whole arm across Abed’s chest.

His hand is bleeding. Abed doesn’t like blood, doesn’t like mess, but he’s getting more and more used to it since the end of the world. He runs his thumb along Jeff’s hand.

**17**

They find peaches again, but there are punctures in the cans, and they’ve spoiled.

Abed kills a zombie that looks like Annie but isn’t.

They’re running low on bullets, and these days, they have trouble finding more.

The Dean says, “Maybe we should—” and his voice trails off. He shrugs. “I mean, we have enough.”

“No,” Troy says, his voice so harsh that it scrapes against Abed like sandpaper. “We’re not doing that. Not ever.”

“Promises, promises,” Britta says. There’s dried blood underneath her fingernails. She smiles.

**18**

_Troy and Abed fighting zom-bies._

**19**

Abed starts fracturing the narrative more and more, to save them, to take the story away.

He tries, but things happen anyway.

He wakes up with the Dean’s hand on his arm and Troy’s breath warm on his neck. They’re in a house, the windows covered with sheets and blankets, and Abed thinks _Fluffytown_ before he remembers that there isn’t a world anymore. Britta is a tangle of dirty yellow hair sticking from a tube of fleece. It’s winter.

Abed has no memories of autumn at all. Weird. Weird, weird, weird.

Jeff’s silhouetted in the window. Abed goes and sits next to him.

“Are we out of food or anything?”

“Glad you could join us,” Jeff says. “We’re not starving. We’re not full, but we’re not starving.” He moves the sheet a little and looks out the window. Snow swirls down. “We should have tried to make it further south. You would have thought of that, probably.”

“I wasn’t talking?”

“True,” Jeff says, “true, true, true,” and Abed almost laughs.

He looks at the fraying sleeves of Jeff’s sweater. “Aren’t you cold?”

“Not so much anymore,” Jeff says. He rolls one sleeve up. His arm is gray to the elbow. He shrugs. “Britta was right—mark that down as the only time anyone in the universe has ever said that. Turns out you can’t keep digging holes into yourself and expect to avoid zombie infection. The left arm—it’s not bad. I can’t feel my thumb there anymore, parts of my feet—it doesn’t matter.”

Abed looks at the gray, stiffened skin.

“Do they know?”

Jeff shakes his head. His eyes are very clear and, with the starlight coming off the snow, very bright. “I was waiting for you. I think I’m going to—I think I’m going to go outside. I’ll take one of the guns—you can come and get it later. One of you.” He rolls his sleeve back down and sighs. “To tell you the truth, I’m a little relieved. I know you had your casting all picked out, but I don’t think I want to be in this movie anymore.”

“Don’t,” Abed says. “Not without telling them.”

But Jeff just smiles. It’s his _I’m a board-certified Spanish tutor_ smile, it’s his _Winger speech to take us home_ smile, only all he says is, “Strange as it may seem, Abed, I’m glad I met you.”

**20**

Abed gets in the habit of asking, “How long?” and this time Troy says, “A year.”

It’s the four of them in a Burger King with broken windows, somewhere where the sun beats down on Abed’s skin like it wants to broil him. He looks around. “Why are we here?”

“It’s your birthday,” Troy says, and he sets a paper crown on top of Abed’s head.

The Dean blows a noisemaker at him. He has a necklace now; a heart-shaped locket.

Britta says, “Happy bi—”

**21**

He wakes up sitting with his feet in the ocean. They’re in Florida.

“Fewer zombies?” he asks Britta.

“It’s warmer,” she says, and she lights a joint and passes it to him.

Abed inhales. He can’t think of a good reason not to. “How long?”

Britta leans over and takes the joint back. “You don’t want to know.”

**22**

“I made a choice,” Abed says to Troy, still in Miami, a long time after it’s just the two of them. He woke up one day and Britta was gone, and so was the Dean, and he didn’t ask Troy what happened. If he doesn’t ask, they’re still alive somewhere. The Dean’s trying on Britta’s high-heeled boots and borrowing her jewelry and Britta’s proud of her open-mindedness. He thinks. He has to believe that. He made a mistake waking up for Jeff and now he’s determined not to do it again.

“Okay,” Troy says slowly. He doesn’t stop running the knife over the leather strap he’s using to sharpen it, but his eyes are on Abed: this is the kind of work that they both know by heart. Abed’s hands do it instinctively.

“I chose us, first, the whole study group, so I didn’t call my dad until it was too late. And then I chose you. I had to choose you. And I subverted the narrative. Because the story’s always the same story, but I—I skipped parts, so it would take longer, but I couldn’t save everyone. Just you.”

“Abed, you’re not God. You didn’t do anything.”

“I did this,” Abed says, because the story’s only in the telling. It isn’t a story if there’s no narrator, no point-of-view character, no one self-aware enough to start thinking in prose instead of images, flickers, insubstantial feelings.

He remembers Annie dying. He chose not describe it, not to dwell on it, but he remembers it. He remembers the way her fever skyrocketed and the way she started crying non-stop, until everyone worried that she would bring the zombies down on them, but no one said, “Shut her up,” and no one said, “Maybe we should—” because it was Annie, their Annie, smudged with dirt and sweat and pus running down her arm, blood from where they tried to cut the infection out. Annie, who should have been their hero, who didn’t need to curl up close to them to get to sleep at night.

Annie with the gauze on her arm. She never turned to stone, not her. She was alive right up until she wasn’t, right up until her eyes stopped fluttering and she stopped breathing.

Then Abed couldn’t deny what he was doing to them, so he jumped faster and faster, broke down the story as much as he could, but then Jeff walked straight-backed out into the snow, and now the Dean and Britta are gone, and Troy doesn’t really smile anymore.

“The story is always the same story,” he says, but it’s a love story, not a zombie story, it’s a tragedy, he has a tragic flaw, he’s always been too awesome for the wall.

“Abed,” Troy says, “just—just _stay_. Can you do that? Just _stay_.”

But there’s camerawork to consider, there’s scripting, there are scenes to block—Abed can’t leave it alone. He can’t. And each time he goes, he wonders if Troy’s going to be there when he gets back.

**23**

Abed’s just trying to buy time. He knows what he knows.

The story is always the same story.

It never ends happily.


End file.
